Anth 07 20.6. 00

20/6/00 The most obvious way to begin is to quote my journal entry from this morning : “Last night I rode (45 mins, one direction) to Litho House for the singing. It seemed an important event in the history of the twists and turns of ‘traditional’ lithuanian singing in Melbourne as I was instrumental in shifting the location of the sessions from Edis’s place to Litho House. Called in on Danius’s on the way. He was rugged up in front of the pot-bellied stove almost in the dark. Outside the immediate circle of the stove the studio is freezing in winter. We talked about the Fluxus exhibition at R.M.I.T. in which he, Mike Stevenson & Co are taking part on the last day. Told him that my mail-art stuff from the Gulf trip was going to be shown by Adriana Cozzolini in Menton in france in february of next year. Then went on to Litho House for the singing – but it was locked up and no lights were on inside. No one had informed me. Perhaps its a kind of leave-taking. At such times it can be hard to tell if its they that leave you or you that leave them. Anyway I suspect its the end of something : the singing into which I put a lot or more importantly the people I sang with, to whom I sang harmony. I wont write any more about it here since as I was riding home I thought I should give a fuller account of it by way of a ‘story’ titled with a date to link it to my 25/1/00 story.” (Yes, it certainly feels like a goodbye! 11/7/00). “ Now for something completely different: yesterday Helen brought home a picture of Dan she had pulled off the internet which you can get from the file of models listed by his management agents F.R.M. The picture is from his promo card (see journal entry 5/4/00). Goes to show that modern technology allows you to track people down even when they make a point of being incommunicado. Beware the internet!” I can put it into a larger context, especially for librarians (my wife Helen is one) by listing the books I’m reading. ‘The Earth Dwellers – Adventures in the Land of the Ants’ by Erich Hoyt touches on the notion of superorganisms, an idea that waxes and wanes with each new generation of entomologists. I wonder if people acting in groups as families, tribes, societies, or as members of organizations are analogous to ant societies. Do people have different personalities (ways of connecting) as members of large groups to the way they are as pairs? Do they have different ways of transferring knowledge in those two cases, different memories, different needs, different imaginations? Is the way of behaving or remembering in a group independent from the way we behave singly? How are the kinds of knowledge of the individual transferred to the systems of knowledge of the group; if it is? Do the secret lives of individuals become the public face of the group by way of its prejudices, codes, religion, culture? I dont suppose ants have all the answers but you’ve got to start somewhere. At the same time I’m into the third volume of Robert Musil’s ‘ The Man Without Qualities’ where many of the same questions are tackled with no reference to ants but with a special emphasis on

marginal personal experiences of the kind that infatuated as we are by the heroic achievements of science we like to suppress in ourselves, or forget, or pretend they never happened, or they happen to us but no one else, or that they have little or nothing to contribute to our well being, or that they are insane. In fact there is no way of telling whether kinds of knowledge described by Musil, for which I can personally vouch, are only marginal or the common property of humanity, for knowledge that is widespread (ways-of-being) may not be admitted to by people even to themselves if its unfashionable. I am also reading ‘On Certainty’, the last musings of the inimitable Ludwig Wittgenstein. I can understand it while I’m reading it but the problem is that every time I resume it it makes no sense unless I go right back to the start again. At this rate I may never finish it. Anyway I’ve just about had enough of Wittgenstein. I agree that we cannot use language to go beyond its own realm and that much, perhaps most, of life is lived outside it but I think Ludwig fails to realise what Foucault sees so clearly which is that language is always expanding its realm, pushing its borders continuously further to new limits. We cannot imagine the end point of that journey – it has given us science and literature; what else can it give? I would suggest too that the domain of language expands at the expense of other regions in which our life is acted out; its the price we pay for progress. I suppose science fiction writers are doing their best to give an answer to these issues. In between reading the above I’m also into Georges Perec’s ‘Species of Spaces and Other Pieces’ which you can buy quite cheaply ($14.95) in the Penguin edition at Borders in Chapel Street, St Kilda. As you probably don’t know Georges Perec was a leading member of the OuLiPo (OUvroir de LItterature POtentielle) group of writers and mathematicians interested in word games and the use of formal constraints in literature. His piece-de-resistance is a 300-page novel ‘La Disparition’ (‘A Void’ in the english version) which contains not a single letter ‘e’, a harder thing to do in french than in chinese. I’ve got it on order in the translated version. I am not sure what the OuLiPo writers hope to achieve by such artifices but Georges Perec is a bloody good writer and perhaps out of respect for him I too considered what constraints I could put on this piece of writing. Its what I was thinking about as I was riding back in the dark and cold from the aborted singing session at Litho House. Maybe, I thought, writing gives shape to the disorganised jumble of impressions that is me by its struggle against whatever it is that wants to silence me. Maybe its the product of the intention to give form to chaos. Maybe its the effort to expand consciousness, especially my consciousness; my effort to control the mute forces threatening to overwhelm me, my control over others (especially friends) and the world. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! So then I thought I’d give it the title ‘20/6/00’ because that would give the story a shape by having certain consequences such as restricting it to the events of one day or so but at the same time formally connecting it to my story ‘25/1/00’. And I could use a front page of a panel of photos taken on the day as I did then. And every 6 months or so I could write another true story in the same format to make a set and people could

collect the set and someone could publish it and make me famous. You can’t ask for more shape than that, or internal tension generated by constraint, except I realised I hadn’t taken any photos yesterday, and the opportunity never presented itself today either. So much for Georges Perec and the OuLiPo group. But at least, dear friends, I am hoping that this overview of my reading provides you with a background to the events of the night which will help you see them through my eyes and give you an insight into the reasons for my state of confusion. Fact is there is a heap of connections between this story ‘20/6/00’ and the other ‘25/1/00’ without the imposition of any additional constraints. I can prove it by quoting yesterdays entry from my journal which luckily is short: “ Caught up with Frank Lovece and Walter Struve at the library then with the owner of Ocean Grange in Victoria St. Means I continue to hand our heaps of stuff; soon I’ll have to run off more of it. At least its cheaper than mailing it. Sent a Dog Scoop card to Mr. U. Karklins and one to F. & L. Osowsky.” It so happens that the owner of Ocean Grange, a grand old mansion with its own jetty, accessible only by boat on the ocean side of the Gippsland Lakes is a rich type I met only for the second time yesterday in the chinese eatery I’ve started frequenting and I gave him a copy of the ‘25/1/00’ story without knowing that by today he would be in ‘20/6/00’. Whats more I’ve been to his house at Ocean Grange, a place hardly anyone has heard of, all of 45 or more years ago when I was still a new arrival in this country and couldnt speak the language properly. Small world, and maybe everything is connected. Frank Lovece is named in ‘25/1/00’ and Walter Struve, though he isnt, is on the credits to the ‘Meditations on Lake Gairdner’ album which ‘25/1/00’ is partly about. Though I didnt know at the time Mr. U. Karklins of Australia Post Security & Investigation Service was already investigating my mailing methods before Helen had finished typing the story. You could say he was there in embryo as the story was also partly about my concerns with Aust. Post. One person who wasnt mentioned but could have been is the guy who carries the ‘Bad Jokes’ sign in Brunswick St. and charges you $1 to tell him a worse joke than he can. He stations himself opposite the Bocadillo Bar where I’m going in an hour or so (its tuesday & I’ll be going to the Make It Up Club too) but I had forgotten about him. I’ve given him the story (as I will this one) and he’s wondered why he’d been left out. Dredging my memory I seem to recollect that he might have been in the street as usual and it may be that there simply wasnt a ready opening for him in the story. I regret the omission. He is a far more important person to Brunswick St. than Adrian Rawlins ever was and Adrian Rawlins had a statue erected to him there. While on that topic I’d like to digress a little to point out to the council that The Boxer (bless his soul in heaven) also deserves a statue, more than Adrian ever did. It so happens that unbeknown to the average member of the cappuccino set parading up and down Brunswick St. in silly clothes that the Bad Jokes man is also a chess master and is at present still away in europe where he has recently taken part in a major chess tournament in Amsterdam. From there

he is kind enough to have promised to post two letters for me: one to Mr. U. Karklins of Australia Post and one to Adriana Cozzolini of france and italy (although as I rewrite my first draft to make it legible for Helen to type I’ve just received a card from Adriana today dated 15/6/00 in italy, Baiardo and she makes no mention of it. Today is friday 23/6/00 and Helen and me will be going out to the Bocadillo Bar and if he is back from europe I’ll be able to ask him why not. I had half expected to see him on tuesday (20/6/00) night. If I had I would have put it into this story. Apparently he’s put up a notice in one of the cafes saying The Bad Joke Man has retired. Hope he means only temporarily while he’s away in europe). Yes, it has to be obvious to blind Freddy and his dog that everything is connected even without the ones obviously manufactured by me. Let me assure readers of this story who are not actually in it that the details are true. The pursuit of truth is far more important to me than the exercise of mere writerly skill. I wholeheartedly agree with Baudrillard that glib writers and film makers are further from reality the more realistic they appear to be. Truth I suspect is awkward, contradictory, bitsy and unbelievable. It doesn’t hang together or flow very well and is always being corrupted and degraded by that cruel tyrant time. Not worth paying for. Things that get put together by magic and will power exist as if by fluke against the trend of play to soon fall apart into their constituents – bodies back into dust, ideas into the waste paper bin. As I was saying I was riding along at night towards Litho House (Errol St. North Melbourne, hangout of the litho diaspora) in a strange mood, partly of anticipation because I like to sing (9pm and I’m now writing in the Bocadillo Bar, Barbara Zira has just brought the first sangria) and because I was somewhat responsible for the change of venue. More importantly because I love (for want of a better word since its been gutted by generations of poets, writers, psychiatrists and other assorted liars) some of the people I sing with. Also though I know that everything is connected I also know that the connections, particularly of friendships, are made from the finest of fragile threads. (She’s just brought the spanish hamburger). But mostly I was in a strange mood because I was riding in a different space, a parallel space, displaced from the norm by only a minor warp but distinct so that other riders occasionally passing in the night were fractionally distorted, and I was riding light, effortlessly, less affected by gravity or in a field of decreased gravity. The main cause of this state was probably that I was still under the influence of a dream I’d had the previous night which was not so much visual though it had that component but a dream of a state, or an experience of a state, a way-of-being. What I had seen were people in the street going their different ways and at their allotted tasks that so absorbed them but I was seeing them from a different space, near but far at the same time. The dream consisted mainly of the experience (Barbara has just brought the 2nd sangria its 9.40 and I might be late for the Make It Up Club) of that space, a visceral experience in the deep regions where it counts below the diaphragm where the kinds of knowledge not understood by

brainy scientists have their source and abode. That was the state I was in and perhaps am much of the time for it would explain why things dont seem to matter very much, why whatever happens seems as if it was meant to happen because as you review your life you see that everything was already there, as seed, in the beginning. You didnt know it then of course but now you find that things are as they were meant to be and its best not to interfere. Que Sera, Sera as the song says and effort only gets in the way of the workings so its best just to relax and admire. And praise. Maybe that was the mood last night, or do I only remember it that way now? Strange but not very strange I would think. Not as strange as the girl I knew for whom the events of the day only repeated what she had already dreamt the previous night. I suggested that she imagined she had already dreamt them but there was no way of telling and in practice it made no difference. Today I remembered how one of my sons when he was still in primary school had invited the whole class to his birthday and not a single kid turned up. The shock has remained with him to this day. As I was riding to the singing session I could have been heading for a similar disappointment because no one else turned up. But it wasnt like that – because of the dream. But who cares! Its all a kind of grandstanding, self-promotion, the excuse being that you’re here only once so you might as well be loud. (I’m back from the Make It Up Club, its 11.45 and I’ve got my 3rd sangria. At the Planet they’re renovating the ground floor now so there’s another parallel with ‘25/1/00’ when they were doing the upstairs.) After talking to Danius I ate a chinese meal at a place on the opposite side of the road from the Litho Club. When I finished at 7.45 I walked across to the club but no one else was in evidence and there were still no lights on inside. I tried the door but it was locked. The singing had been supposed to start at 7.30. So I went to the pub opposite the old town hall and drank a pot of beer. There were some short stocky guys there who looked like italians but spoke another language. I occupied myself wondering what language it was but to no avail. At 8.15 I tried the club door again. Rang home to say I might be back early but more because I didnt know what to do with myself then drank a glass of red wine in a yuppy (frequented by gays) bread-shop-café near by. Went back to the pub where I bought a stubby of Abbots Invalid Stout to-take-away and walked over to the club once more. There was a single feeble light on in the foyer! I tried the door and it opened. Took the bike inside and lent it against a bench. Listened. Called out. There was no one about. Could hear what sounded like dance music with thumping and an occasional crash of cymbals coming from upstairs. It had an oriental ring to it and I surmised it must have been carrying through the wall from next door. Tried various doors into the foyer but all were locked except the one into the toilet on the landing half way up the stairs to the 1st floor. Eerie. No explanation. No one about. Had the light been programmed to switch on automatically? Perhaps the door was unlocked from the start but I hadnt tried it properly on the first two occasions. As it was anyone could

have walked in just as I had. The credit union has an office directly off the foyer and has been burgled before. No wonder if this is the usual level of security. (I’m back at home and its 1am. So now its no longer 20/6/00 though nothing has changed in the meantime. I’ve just had a snack of macadamia nuts, toasted bread with crushed garlic spread with honey and butter, and a persimmon. I’ve poured myself a shot of Anise, an Italian liqueur which is 40% proof and normally used to put a kick into very strong black coffee. Here is the remainder of my journal entry for the day even though it was written after midnight): “Spent a good fraction of the rest of the day writing the story ‘20/6/00’. Made a point of writing part of it at the Bocadillo Bar because I wanted it to represent what I was doing instead of what I was inventing. Time to hit the sack.” The trouble with writing is that words can never capture the moment. They describe and inevitably nail down experiences that are floating and shapeless. Besides, written language is linear: those small structures are arranged in order across the page and read in sequence (while we were away I’ve decided I’m going to write an essay on this; 9/7/00) whereas experience is felt in different spaces all at once. If you try to capture and make still what can only exist in motion you destroy it. Experiences are strong because of their flux, because they hold and buffet you in strange swirling currents like waves colliding in an ocean. Thats the paradox of writing, the dilemma every writer has to confront. Nevertheless I press on. (Its saturday 24/6/00 and I resume the transcription; I’m packed for 2 weeks of travelling with Helen starting tomorrow; I’ve responded to Adriana’s card by sending her a copy of my mother’s book; I’ve given a copy of the ‘A-Z Travel Guide to North Central Australia and Queensland’ to the girl in the newsagents. The Bad Joke man again wasnt there last night. Helen nominated that I should finally do the overseas trip I’ve been soul searching about for years. She suggested I should start it in Menton in february and be away for a year. Problem is I’m only prepared to go if I can avoid being a tourist – but how? I hate dilettantism.) I am in Litho House, Errol St. North Melbourne by myself and everything is silent. Except now and then I hear people talking as they walk by on the footpath outside the foyer doors. I look over to see if its some of the other singers come late but its just passers by. I go upstairs to the toilet and grope in the pitch black to switch on the light. Later down in the foyer again I do a tour of inspection of the wall decorations. They consist of a mix of carved sculptures, some geometric, some fantastically contorted depicting suffering, linen hangings with patriotic poems and songs woven into them, pictures of medieval grand dukes representing the heroic antiquity of the lithuanian tribes. The overall effect is clean, rather bare, almost clinical, certainly kitsch. I wonder what is the cause of this barrenness of the imagination. Am I seeing an example of how constrictions on the personalities of individuals, perhaps self-imposed, are being translated into the cultural aesthetic values of a whole group? Is the way a community expresses itself in the choice of its symbols and decorations a reflection of the hidden lives of its members? I stand

in front of one of the linen hangings, a long one. It has the words of a song in block letters woven down its length. The song is ‘Lietuva Brangi Mano Tevyne’ (‘Lithuania Cherished Soil My Homeland’). I am reading the words as I sing them sotto voce but I know them off by heart. Then I sing louder, every verse to the end of the song. There is no one to hear. The foyer is L shaped so that the half of it around the corner is not visible from the main door. It is dark here as the single light is in the front section. Up against the wall completely invisible in the gloom is a comfortable armchair. I unscrew the stubby of Abbots Invalid Stout I’ve been holding all this time and sit back in the armchair. I am looking at one of the traditional symbols carved in wood on the opposite wall which catches some of the light from the front part of the foyer. The symbol is shaped rather like the letter E laying on its back with the points facing upwards. It is called Gedimino Stulpai (The Columns of Gediminas). Gediminas was one of the grand-dukes. This decoration is solidly constructed out of timber beams some 15cms wide by 4 cms thick and covers an area of wall about 8 ft. wide by 5 ft. high. It is polished or lacquered a glossy light brown. It is ugly. Its uncompromising geometric prongs make me think of the arms of the swastika. I can’t take my eyes off it. I am in a meditative mood, sitting in the dark, drinking my stubby very slowly. About half the face of the Stulpai is incongruously covered by shiny brass plaques each of about 3 x 4 inches inscribed with the name of a dead lithuanian, always male. I wonder who these men are. Are they community notables? Are they people whose families have given donations? Are they members of some organization of lithuanian patriots? Is my father’s name there? I think its probably not there as he was not one for organizations. But I can’t see from where I am as the light is not good and I dont get up to check. Then I notice that on the middle prong, the tallest, near the top is another symbol. Symbols on symbols! Marriage of symbols. This one is the cross, I mean the christian, the Jesus Christ cross. Its a plain, unadorned (Christ has risen!), solid looking white cross and it occurs to me that if you bent the arms it would look even more like the swastika than the duke’s columns. Flanking either side are the letters A, A also solid in white. Can’t be Alcoholics Anonymous, I muse, but I can’t think of anything else they could mean. I peer about the shadowy foyer and sure enough against the wall in the corner is another cross but life size and massive as if it might be made from railway sleepers. It too is polished a glossy light brown. Salve for the conscience? How they must need to keep reminding themselves of their piety, I think. What is said in the discussion you have with yourself is only a part of the story, small part at that. Most of your experience is in the body, in the hard wiring if you like. Words are the final expressions of your physical habits, the way you flex your muscles, constrict your stomach, tension your shoulders, the ebb and flow of your adrenalin. They are only the bubbles on the surface, easily forgotten; dissipate into thin air. But the knowledge in the body acquired by the sum of your life is with you always. Its hard earnt – your way-of-being. If I am to describe to you who I

was as I sat in the gloom slumped in the couch, holding a stubby, contemplating the symbols with which some lithuanian emigrants and their descendants clothe their identity by giving only an account of the conversation I conducted with myself I would be barely scratching the surface. For everything that I saw in front of me was being sifted through the grid of my body, or character if you prefer a vaguer word, or past history should you really want to get controversial. So you see why an accurate description is impossible. Yet I persist in the endeavour against the odds. I continue this exercise in self publicity trying to draw you into my way of seeing. Its impossible for you to see the decorations on the foyer walls through my eyes without some knowledge of a preoccupation, or obsession some accuse, that has held me in its grip for several years now. But instead of listing articles, rehashing debating points, or trying to give you an idea of the thousands and thousands of words I’ve written on the topic (enough for a book) I am going to jump forward in time to my journal entries for august 19th and august 14th. I’ve been planning them for some time and they are meant to round off in a couple of pages that long enquiry. 19th/aug./41 is the day I was born in Kaunas the capital of prewar lithuania and the 14th of august is the day that Colonel Vytautas Reivytis, head of the Lithuanian Police Department under the occupying german forces issued Secret Order No. 3 - to count, gather, detain and “transport” jews. If we are to assign a particular day for the beginning of the holocaust in europe then this is probably it. Here are the bare facts. The leader in the baltic region was General Fritz Stahlecker commander of Einsatzgruppe A. Colonel Karl Jaeger was in command of Einsatzkommando 3 whose area covered lithuania. On august 1st 1941 some 90% of lithuanian jews were still alive. By december 1st of the same year two thirds of them (137,000) were dead according to Colonel Karl Jaeger’s report. The rest (40,000) were in the major ghettos of Kaunas, Vilnius and Siauliai where most of them ultimately perished. In no country in europe was a higher percentage of its jews murdered in as short a time. Here I must digress a little. The capacity for murdering large numbers of humans even without recourse to gas ovens is extraordinary. A former N.K.V.D. officer had claimed that at Katyn a single executioner labouring with a pistol and elbow-length gloves killed most of the 4000 polish officers that were the victims of that exercise by the communists. In lithuania the most bloody day was on oct. 29 when 10,000 jews were shot in one day in the 9th Fort in Kaunas. The executions of ordinary jews in the countryside was most speedily carried out by S.S. Lieutenant Joachim Hamman’s Rollkommando. This highly mobile unit travelled from one rural district to the next supervising the executions (and taking part) of the jews that had been collected (or had assembled) as a result of Secret Order No. 3 issued on aug. 14th. According to Lieutenant Joachim Hamman’s own estimate some 77,000 persons were executed in less than 8 weeks though some historians dispute this, putting the figure as low as 60,000. The Rollkommando consisted of a dozen germans and some 60

lithuanians who in turn were commanded by Lt. Bronius Norkus. The normal rotation of personnel means that the total number involved in the unit would have been somewhat greater. In all, those directly involved in the slaughter of jews throughout lithuania during the holocaust consisted of some 100s of germans and some 1000s of lithuanians. These lithuanians and further 1000s that were responsible for the execution of Secret Order No. 3 were mainly drawn from the 20 police battalions numbering somewhere between 8.3 thousand and 13 thousand men. The above will be my entry for august 14th. For my birthday on the 19th I’ll enter a more general ‘historical’ overview, the final assessment or verdict so to speak, for from then on I intend to put the topic aside. Here it is, or something like it. The murder of the jews of lithuania was initiated by the germans. It was supervised by a small group of several hundred germans with the active support of thousands of enthusiastic lithuanians with the tacit complicity of the bulk of the population and significant sections of the educated classes many of whom were outstanding in their failure to raise objections (though some did). The main cultural legacy of expatriate lithuanians like myself was to inherit the suppression of the knowledge of the facts. This purposeful evasion or collective amnesia has been so effective that those of my generation, even when born in lithuania and where both parents are of lithuanian origin, know nothing of the facts I’ve just outlined. The expatriate communities were guilty and still are of being accessories after the fact. They are guilty in the true sense of the word at a cultural level for they hid the evidence (like hiding the body) and gave shelter to some of the perpetrators. By and large they still deny both the guilt and sometimes that the events even happened. Sometimes they say the victims were at fault. There is a move now in lithuania among historians to sheet the bulk of the blame for collaboration in the murders onto the 8.5 – 13 thousand members of the 20 police battalions. I see this as a convenient exercise in scapegoating as they know very well that most of these men ended up overseas (though without becoming members of the expatriate ‘communities’ I would think) where their descendants also are. The men themselves are dead in most cases. I see a community to be an organic whole with all its branches bearing some responsibility for its actions. The members of the battalions had wives, sisters, mothers and fathers who tried or pretended not to know. The wives etc. had friends to confide in. The educated classes collaborated in teaching their children a history that bore no relationship to the events, and still doesnt. I see these so called ‘intellectuals’ who continue to distort or hide the facts, even from themselves, as more blameworthy than the barely literate peasants who did the shooting and who were surely insane. For me its time to leave what took place 60 years ago behind. To continue is to risk being haunted. It goes without saying that as I sat in the hush of the foyer holding what was by now an empty stubby none of the material I’ve just outlined entered into the

conversation I had with myself. But you can be sure it was there in the gut, in the way my hands twitched. And it remains there whatever decisions I come to; some things can’t be digested. But on the surface in my mood of self-absorption I was more likely to be savouring the strange sensation of being alone on a winter night when I expected to be fooling around singing with a group of friends. Now only two days later, as I write, I am no longer sure what I remember and what I’m inventing. Thats memory for you. It is disintegrating even as it is being excavated and is being replaced moment by moment by new memories which themselves disappear like phantoms as they are exposed to the light. By these small steps which give our identities an illusion of continuity we end up somewhere completely different to where we were at the start but still believe we are seeing the world now as we did then. I have no memory at all of leaving the foyer. I know I didnt think to ring anyone to tell them that the front door was unlocked. Only a few days earlier I had suggested to Helen that we transfer some of our money into the credit union (Talka = Help) but now I’m not sure if we should. I can’t remember what I was feeling on the ride home anymore (though I may have when I started writing). Perhaps I had that special queasiness in the pit of the stomach, or wherever it sits, when you imagine your friends may have dropped you. I’ve been through it before. No doubt I wondered why no one had thought to inform me of the cancellation. But mainly, dear friends, I think I just enjoyed the ride home for no doubt I was still under the influence of the dream I’ve told you about. I am now as I write. I seem to remember that I’ve already interpreted it for you. Things are as they are meant to be. A review of my past seems to support it (unless I have a curious relationship to time). If I have done my last impression of litho peasant singing its because its time to move on. I would have had a fun night singing but this way I had a really important night and it has led to this story which continues on. It means I should be spending more time writing or staying at home on monday nights reading the mountain of books that I’ve recently accumulated and that I’m itching to get into: Joseph Roth’s ‘Radetzky March’; Victor Pelevin’s ‘Life of Insects’; ‘The Magician of Lublin’ by Isaac Bashevis Singer; a huge tome by Alexander Zinoniev, ‘The Yawning Heights’, given to me as a present by Saulius Varnas who claims its one of the best reads of the modern era; and many others. (And now, 9/7/00, I find that Peter Murphy, an underrated local writer, has left a copy of his ‘Black Light’ (isbn 0 7256 0229 5) at our place while we were away.) Perhaps I should be doing more trips. In a few days I’m going away for a couple of weeks with Helen. Maybe after that I should do one to the interior, to Lake Gairdner or another one of the salt lakes (Lake Eyre has water in it this year) and write a whole set of mail-art (Arte Postale) letters to Adriana Cozzolini. Living as she does in a picturesque hill town in italy in summer and spending her winters in Menton on the french riviera she may find the goings on in the remote desert inland of an eccentric australian born in lithuania somewhat entertaining.

(Its thursday 22/6/00 and I’m on my way to Stalactytes where I’ll be from 12.30 – 2.30 as per usual where Kate might catch up with me. I’ve pulled up by the bike path in Brunswick to check the message bank on the mobile. There is one from Helen sent at 8.40 this morning saying that we havent seen much of each other this week and that she is really looking forward to going out tomorrow night to the Bocadillo Bar. I’ve just rung the library but she’s at a meeting for the next hour. We havent ‘seen’ each other because I’ve been concentrating on the story. I wanted to tell her that I’m also looking forward to going out on friday and that though we havent seen much of each other we’ve hugged each other in bed at nights and that on sunday we’re heading off together for two weeks to a string of beautiful beaches on the south coast of N.S.W. I’ll ring her again from Stalactytes). As for the writing of history – also let it be. Who cares what historians do. Recently I read a history of south america ‘Memory of Fire’ by Eduardo Galeano written entirely from the perspective of the murder and exploitation of the native indians. I bet it hasnt made an iota of difference. They wont return to hunt naked in the jungles because the jungles themselves will be gone. School kids in australia are finally being told that the aborigines did once live here after all and were massacred. It wont bring them back, the dreaming is over. Lithuanian historians may yet own up to their complicity in the murder of the jews but the rabbis will never again dispense judgements with the wisdom of Solomon in the schools and synagogues of those ancient centres of hebrew learning in Kaunas and Vilnius. And dare I say that if a chapter on the dispossession of the palestinians is inserted into the history books of israeli school children it wont return Jerusalem back to the arabs. All that will happen will be displays of public sorrow on TV, shedding of hypocritical tears, signatures on empty documents, the cluttering up of the countryside with memorials and ugly monuments. Everything passes. The only certainties are death, change, and renewal. Perhaps the purpose of history is to produce an illusion of continuity. We try to overcome corruption and decay by pretending that there is some kind of underlying constant which we like to call truth so that we can stand on a stable platform to launch ourselves into a glorious future. In the face of everything disappearing: moments … memories … friendships … lives … we seek immortality by inventing a past that we like to believe has always been and continues to be there and a future where we will deposit our traces by way of children or reputations. The purpose of history may be to overcome the flux of change by inventing spurious reasons for optimism. Perhaps its best after all that we learn ‘counter’ histories based on ‘counter’ memories as Foucault would put it (& Robert Musil well before him) for to look back is to dwell on death. I have been interested in how groups of people be they tribes or nations store their memories or invent them and how they hide them from themselves; how political those memories are and how they are used in statements about group identity. No less interesting, my friend, is how we can hide our individual

memories from ourselves, a process just as political in the struggle for development between the different rooms that constitute the house of our personality. And perhaps thats how it should be for if we are doomed to be divided into compartments it may be better if the doors to certain rooms are forever kept shut and even the existence of the rooms themselves be forgotten to language. For if we were able to look into them it would be too terrible and make us cry all the time. Better that we live in sunny rooms so that we can look out of the windows with confidence into a bright future. Its the end of the story. On the way back in the rain from Stalactytes where Kate did put in an appearance and I did get through to Helen in the library I called in on Danius Kesminas again. Drops of rain were leaking through nail holes in the roof of his studio home. He asked me what had happened on monday night so I read out to him the first page of the draft. (With Helen about to start typing (9/7/00) it occurs to me that I might as well confess to you, as I did to Danius then, that I called in on him only because I wanted to connect this final paragraph with the beginning of the story. However he did ask about the monday without being prompted, as he himself pointed out to me.) He’ll find out the rest when I give him the completed product in a month or so. I’m repeating myself, completing circles, each one a bit different to the last. Phew!!!